Skip Fox

Skip Fox began writing, primarily poetry, in 1969 at the behest of The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 animating the context of his situation, wandering the Olympic Peninsula, on the lam from the F.B.I., homeless then in former logging camps, working in the woods all day, reading Snyder, Olson, Ginsberg, Creeley, and later Pound all night. Feeling he had dedicated his life to poetry, he wrote diligently and whole-heartedly for years without effect save for the enhancement of his being. But it wasn’t until 1991 that his first book (Kabul under Siege) was published in an intelligently crafted letterpress edition by Bloody Twins Press who published another of his works (Wallet) in letterpress edition reflecting the “density of intent bearing through an insistent delicacy,” of the Mayan line it temporarily embodies.

Since then he has publish two more chapbooks of poetry, four multi-genre books considered poetry, two with Ahadada Press (e.g., Delta Blues), as well as a selected poems: Sheer Indefinite: Selected Poems, 1991-2011* (New Orleans University Press, 2012), all the while teaching at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. (He also published, with G.K. Hall, a 550 page annotated, secondary bibliography on Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan; worked for the MLA International Bibliography for over a dozen years; and was the book review editor of Bulletin of Bibliography for over seven.)

These are the facts. But what happens when transparency disappears? Perhaps a life is revealed which had been blind to itself, lost in catoptric address. Or perhaps all that is left is the text. Or “a little hat, and a little hand, and a little wag,” as they say. Or engaging each morning with words, “where the recognitions are” as Duncan had it, despite the utter futility of our situation, an early-middle act of the Sixth Major Extinction Event. Maintaining his dedication while contending lucidities pull at him and voices just the other side of his tinnitus are forever screaming, he sits at the threshold of your attention.